Northants VLE Downtime

[GrumbleDook]

Another bit of an announce ... this has already been published at the top level of the Northants Site.

 

During the course of Saturday and Sunday LP+ are moving their servers to a new larger server farm. This will mean that enable is unlikely to be accessible before Monday morning. The new servers will provide LP+ with a greater capacity for expansion and the provision of new services. We are working hard with LP+ to overcome some problems with adding web parts to the front page.

 

This is an error which Microsoft are aware of and hopefully they are working on a solution.

[apoth0r]

Cheers muchly

[monty]

Hopefully this means it will then be faster.

I noticed they are just using sharepoint services, have they any plans to use the full sharepoint portal server? There were some things in portal server that looked quite good.

[Rorya1]

Hi Monty,

 

I am the Tech Ops Manager at LP+, and wanted to clarify the following in answer to your question.

 

The Northants portal is based Microsoft MOSS 2007 Enterprise offering, rather than only WSS. This means that we provide full enterprise level functionality including

- Infopath web services

- Excel services

- Publishing infrastructure services

 

For your information:

The downtime this weekend was completed as planned, in only 24 hours, with over 50 servers being provisioned and just over 10 terabytes of storage implemented. Including the Northants implementation, the user accounts and data for around 130,000 users were successfully moved. Our new data centre in London provides greater resilience and capacity for growth to allow a robust and capable service to our schools, authorities and other local government organisations.

[GrumbleDook]

And I typed that without moving my fingers ;-)

 

Good to see you Rory, I'll catch up with you tomorrow.

[GrumbleDook]

Just a note so that this doesn't turn into a Northants-fest ...

 

There is a Northants Techies social group, please add yourself if you do tech support in the northants area ... it is not really as a discussion board but I will try and make sure announcements for Northants go on there in future.

[kmount]

The downtime was indeed brief, so congrats to LP+ there. - I have noticed some improvement in speed but still seems slow(er) on authentication.

 

Slightly off topic, but collaring the man who may know!

 

Any news on when we'll be able to update our users etc from SIMS without having to manually request it from LP+?

 

Similarly, I understand from LP+ support that there is a charge for allowing Outlook to connect to the Exchange server, do we know a cost yet?

 

Cheers.

[GrumbleDook]

Leave it with me and I'll try and get answers on both by the end of the week. This week I am mainly chasing schools who have not return the questionnaire to help with EMBC transition. Only about 80 from 330 in so far ... and this is already after having given an extension.

[kmount]

I've done mine, but it was late because nobody bothered to tell me it was sitting there waiting to be answered! (Not in the loop it seems!).

[GrumbleDook]

I've done mine, but it was late because nobody bothered to tell me it was sitting there waiting to be answered! (Not in the loop it seems!).

 

Yep, commonly reported issue ... either that or they don't know who would have any of the information (remember that some primaries and infants only see their technician once a month or once a fortnight and they have a full job list when they get there anyway).

 

Still ... gives me something to do tomorrow ... and thursday ...

[kmount]

If you want to sharezie in my catchment give me a shout.

[apoth0r]

I'm having a similar problem, althought I work in a primary school it would still be nice to recieve the goods.

Anyway I can have emails direct?